Via the Celtics Twitter account:

Big Baby is not participating in today’s shootaround, he’s out for tonight’s game vs. Phoenix and is considered day-to-day.

As if watching the Celtics lose two very winnable games against mediocre (at best) opponents, today TrueHoop posted a video of Baron Davis walking through his game-winner the other night.

Since I’m spineless, I decided to alleviate my pain by sharing it with you guys…

The Celtics have gotten rid of their morning walkthrough, but that doesn’t mean we have to. Here are a few Celtics links, and maybe even an NBA link or two, to help wake you up and get you focused for the day.

Steve Bulpett, Boston Herald – “‘Things happen to us that you turn and you ask yourself, ‘Why me?’ ” Garnett said as the Celtics had yesterday off in preparation for tonight’s road trip finale against the Phoenix Suns. “I told him when he went to the line (Monday), I smacked him and I said, ‘Yeah, redemption. Payback.’ I just kept filling him with that. It either makes you or breaks you, man. You can’t break this kid. This kid is made of carbon, man. Everybody knows what carbon is. You know that it’s damn near invincible. It’s just more than a pleasure to be his teammate.’ Rondo shrugged it all off, but he was seriously down in LA. ‘I was bummed out up until gametime (Monday),” Rondo said. “But luckily it’s the NBA. We had a back-to-back, so I tried to redeem myself, but we still got another loss. For me, I get down on myself. I’m very hard on myself. But I’m still confident. I’m going to play the game and feel like I’m the best at it.’”

Gary Washburn, Boston Globe – “‘I think it’s a combination of we’re getting some pretty good performances by other teams and we’re not playing as hard as we can play for 48 minutes,’ he said. ‘We think we can show up for a quarter or a half, and that’s not good enough in this league, and that’s been our pattern. We come out of the gates ready to play and have shown up to play in some cases. Other cases we haven’t; we’ve had to turn it on in the second half. That’s the fear I had at the beginning of the season – play it out and wait for the playoffs to roll around and not bringing it night in and night out. This is the second stretch where we really haven’t really shown up. The urgency of winning from the get-go hasn’t been important enough.’ Mentally – and that’s 90 percent of how NBA games are won – the Celtics had the Warriors defeated. All that was required was basic execution for the final three quarters. But with tired bodies on the second game of a back-to-back stretch, Paul Pierce sitting in his Waltham home trying not to kick the television with his healing right leg, and the offense depending solely on Rajon Rondo, the Celtics faltered.”

Steve Bulpett, Boston Herald – “On one hand, Doc Rivers has derided his team’s play even in victories. But he seemed to be debating himself when he let his guys off the hook. ‘If you look around, all the good teams have tight games against the lower teams,’ he said. ‘These are NBA players, so they’re going to play well. And it’s tough to win an NBA game. I think if you ask the bad teams, they’ll tell you that.’ The problem the Celtics encounter is a boredom of sorts. They generally lose the mental energy to simply run their stuff and make extra passes when they get around teams they see as beneath them. On the rare occasions when they stick with their plan, they systematically run the foe out of the building. But too often they take the ball and try to make individual plays. The issue is even more acute down the stretch. With the experience and alleged wisdom on the team, it just shouldn’t be happening this often.”

A. Sherrod Blakely, CSNNE - “For a veteran team, we played with absolutely zero composure,’ Rivers said. ‘We just didn’t play like a veteran basketball team tonight.’ Little did Rivers know that would be a recurring theme just 24 hours later. Ill-timed turnovers. Poor shot selection. Mental breakdowns defensively. If there was a way to keep the Warriors in the game, the Celtics were more than willing to give it to them. Kevin Garnett understands what’s going on. The Celtics aren’t playing Celtics basketball.”

Gary Washburn, Boston Globe – “Davis left Oracle in arena wearing a protective boot and walking with crutches. ‘I haven’t heard anything, which means nothing is serious,’ Ainge said. ‘I sent (trainer) Eddie (Lacerte) a text and I haven’t heard anything and usually that means it’s not much.’ Meanwhile, Ainge said the team will evaluate Paul Pierce’s right knee this weekend to determine when he will return. ‘We don’t have any definite dates or change on Paul,’ he said.”

Have a link I might want to look at? Send it my way by email (jayking@celticstown.com) or Twitter.

Once in a while, someone else’s article catches my eye. Sometimes, it’s because the article is so spot-on I wish I’d written it myself. Other times, it’s because the article enlightens me with something I never knew. Still other times, it’s because I disagree with whatever’s written. No matter what the reason, I dish it off to another writer to make his/her point. You know, throwing some dimes.

• Red’s Army runs through the ten worst Celtics moments of the decade.  My favorite?  Number nine, Rick Pitino.  It’s not often a top ten worst moment of the decade can make me laugh for full minutes at a time:

“Larry Bird is not walking through that door, fans. Kevin McHale is not walking through that door, and Robert Parish is not walking through that door. And if you expect them to walk through that door, they’re going to be gray and old. What we are is young, exciting, hard-working, and we’re going to improve. People don’t realize that, and as soon as they realize those three guys are not coming through that door, the better this town will be for all of us because there are young guys in that (locker) room playing their asses off. I wish we had $90 million under the salary cap, I wish we could buy the world. We can’t; the only thing we can do is work hard, and all the negativity that’s in this town sucks. I’ve been around when Jim Rice was booed. I’ve been around when Yaz was booed. And it stinks. It makes the greatest town, greatest city in the world, lousy. The only thing that will turn this around is being upbeat and positive like we are in that locker room… and if you think I’m going to succumb to negativity, you’re wrong. You’ve got the wrong guy leading this team.”

• Celtics Stuff Live runs down the Celtics Team of the Decade, and if you don’t want to see who they picked for the team, at least check out the picture…  It’s priceless.
• According to Jon Duke, “Now is the time to dust off Messrs. Walker and Giddens and have them play with the type of reckless abandon that might make even Tony Allen say, ‘hey, simmer down fellas.’”
• Don’t look now, but Rajon Rondo is on pace to set the franchise record for assists.

Wanna throw your own dime, and get someone’s article recognized? Email me at jayking@celticstown.com or follow me on Twitter.

You’ve got to love Steve Bulpett of the Boston Herald for his article today about Rasheed Wallace. Just when the league thought it could get away without shining any more publicity on the Tim Donaghy scandal, Bulpett shined a light on their willingness to do whatever they can to let the scandal slide away:

When Rasheed Wallace said three weeks ago that the NBA was headed for a crash to rival the college basketball betting scandal of the 1950s, it seemed fairly certain the league’s lords of discipline would be hitting him with another fine.

But there was silence from the big offices, and now it appears that was quite by plan. According to sources, the NBA did contact the Celtics about comments from Wallace and Ray Allen regarding allegations by convicted former referee Tim Donaghy, but it preferred to lend no further publicity to the matter.

I really love bringing publicity to the fact that the NBA didn’t want publicity, thereby generating the publicity they never wanted… or something like that.

I hope every NBA blog in the world links to Bulpett’s article. Putting as much publicity as possible on the Donaghy scandal is a good thing, so that the NBA will be forced to take protective measurements to ensure that nothing like that ever happens again. 

Could I possibly have said publicity any more times within this post?  Yup.  Publicity.